What We Look For When We Look For The Historical Jesus

“What the amateur reader wants, given the thickets of uncertainty that surround the garden, is not what the passionate polemicists want – not so much a verdict on whether Jesus was nasty or nice as a sense of what, if anything, was new in his preaching. … Did the rise of Christendom take place because historical plates were moving, with a poor martyred prophet caught between, or did one small pebble of parable and preaching start the avalanche that ended the antique world?”